The nearest link in the online library evolution is already here OPACs have get to a long way.

The nearest link in the online library evolution is already here

OPACs have get to a long way. When I first started working with them in the early 1980 they were, literally, "electronic card catalogs." The information in them was derived from the data used to print catalog cards. The most

important difference was that the card catalog showed solely information about book titles in general. The OPAC could relate you whether or not the work was checked out and, if likewise when it was due to be returned

For a time, the sum of two units systems coexisted at my library. single day, however, cards stopped arriving at the catalog and we started to concentrate forward making the OPAC the prime source of information about our collection. A year or in the way that later, the cabinets disappeared altogether, and not many people seemed to notice.

through then, the OPAC had improved a bit. The biggest gain was in keyword searching. Instead of just listing data, the OPAC could combine things in a way that a card catalog not ever could. We could pose like queries as, "Show me each title that mentions Mark Twain and cats," and get by heart results. We take it for granted now, further that was very liberating in the late '80 Not entirely liberating however because people still had to fare to the library to use the OPAC.

That started to change in the early 1990 as librarians began to papal court the possibilities of the Internet. pretty soon students were checking the catalog from their domestic circles or dorm rooms. Librarians were learning that according to adding large fields of satisfieds notes, their users could find short stories or unruffled songs in large anthologies--benefits that were impractical with the card catalog.

With the advent of the Web came a quantum leap in OPAC functionality. Not solely could we control the consider of the catalog, but we could now use the OPAC as a jumping-off point to finish to other information sources. The expression "virtual library" came into fashion in the early '90s, and OPAC technology from the end of the decade was making them a reality as thousands of titles showed up in succession the Web, enabling OPACs to provide links to them.

The preceding may look like a lot of time exhausted in the past, but I think it's too easy for us to concentrate forward the next program or gadget disclosed there and lose track of the fact that we are in the middle of the same big unfolding story: specifically, the ways in which we are using technology to realize people to the information they need

Back to the Future

At my library, we were aware that e-book were upon the Web, but did not track the matter aggressively until early this year. united thing that influenced me to add e-book to our body was an improvement in our Innovative Interfaces catalog that allowed for regular, systematic checking of each link in the online catalog. While many of the e-book were high hilled by substantial sites like the University of Michigan's Making of America throw out others appeared to be scamper on some sort of shoestring operation. I knew that more [i]or[/i] less of these would soon disappear, in the same manner it made me nervous to have thousands of links on the other hand no reliable quality control. Knowing that I could always check validity at the push of a button, I felt it was time to move into full production of e-book links. We were going to add a brick to the virtual library.

What to Do First

I knew that we wouldn't be finding e-book of Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Faulkner. Their works are all copyrighted and unavailable (as they should be). I started with the 19th hundred and worked back. Using Yahoo!, I place a page devoted to Dickens that l to links according to a company called Bibliomania.com. It's hard to number what Bibliomania.com is all about, because its Web site gives no history of the company nor any means to contact it. forward the other hand, it has a stunning collection of available literary classics, including the integral plays of Shakespeare.

The richest link to date has been a site maintained from the University of Pennsylvania that indexes the e-book ease of the Web by title or author. Its virtual library OPAC can be lay the foundation of at http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/authors.html. It brings together e-book from concoct Gutenberg, Making of America, Bibliomania.com, and others. Sometimes, a literary classic will have up to three sites with separate editions. an of my favorite e-books are from the University of Virginia's virtual library, which includes scans of each illustration in a book

After a month we had linked to the major classics, and we now had e-book of Twain, Hardy, and Plato that our learners could access 24 hours a day from any location. This linking plan went quickly because the mechanics are quite simple. First, we added an 856 field to the MARC record of the part (most of this was done with macros). Then, we copied and pasted the URL (see Figure 1) In the Webpac display (see Figure 2) the patron dioceses the standard bibliographic data, followed from a link to access the entire work.

For the nearest phase of the project, we targeted a particular area: a microfiche collection of 19th-century American works called The Library of American Civilization (LAC). This consists of more than 4000 main division s of original source material. The riddle is that the format is a subminiature microfiche card that requires a special reader. We'd had many close examiners ask about these works because they are in the OPAC, moreover as soon as they diocese what they're dealing with, they fare on to something else. If we could prepare digital links to these titles, that would expound a big problem. In the initial phase of our linking cast we ran across major works similar as Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery in the Penn list--books that were also in the LAC collection.